]]>http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/whats-the-worst-present-youve-ever-received/feed/0Looking Back at Toshiro Mifune’s Legendary Careerhttp://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/toshiro-mifune/
http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/toshiro-mifune/#commentsFri, 02 Dec 2016 22:11:45 +0000http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/?p=9818From the 1940s and into the ‘80s, Toshiro Mifune was known around the world as Japan’s answer to John Wayne. He starred in almost 200 movies, including a slew of classics directed by the great Akira Kurosawa.

His life is now the subject of a new film called, “Mifune: The Last Samurai.” It’s from Oscar-winning documentarian Steven Okazaki, and he chatted with us about the unexpected start of Mifune’s on-screen career, his rebellious spirit, and more.

Interview Highlights:

On watching Mifune’s films as a kid in 1960s California

Steven Okazaki: There were several Japanese movie theaters in Los Angeles. And we went to them devotedly, and it was kind of cool. They had green tea as well as Coca-Cola. I had senbei, which is the rice crackers. You pour them in your popcorn and mix them up. The Hawaiians call it mochi crunch.

And so, there was…I don’t know, just that experience of feeling a little more international and seeing the Toshiro Mifune films when I was a kid.

On why Mifune ended up being a longstanding figure of rebellion

Mifune was always sort of bred to be a bit of an individual. He did not grow up in Japan. He grew up in Japanese-occupied China and did not step into Japan until he was 21.

And then, when he was in the army, he trained kamikaze pilots, and he always got in trouble. When he was a kid, we talk about how he always got into got into fights defending his brother. So, he was kind of always a bit of a rebel.

On how the start of Mifune’s acting career was kind of a fluke

Japan was just devastated after the war, and you had all these young men and women without jobs. Mifune was just looking for a job, and, because his father had run a still photography studio, he had some technical skills.

So, he applied to be a camera assistant at Toho Studios. Which later brought us Godzilla. And, one thing about Mifune — he’s strikingly good-looking. He’s just striking, you know? So, somebody pushed his resume over to the acting competition. It was called “New Faces.” And you can see, in the photos of the young men who are competing — I mean, you can see the rib cages on most of the men. They’re basically starving, looking for a job.

Mifune, likewise, just wanted to get a job and happened to meet one of the great Japanese directors, Akira Kurosawa. And they formed this collaboration, alliance, and made 16 incredible films together.

On what director Akira Kurosawa might’ve seen in a young Mifune

I think that, for Kurosawa, Mifune was clearly someone who could be different than the traditional matinee movie star of Japan at the time. In the film, someone’s commenting on Mifune’s big breakthrough film, “Rashomon,” and he just says, “We didn’t know what to think. We just went, ‘What?'”

He was so gruff and raw in that film. And Martin Scorsese is in the film and comments that Mifune studied lions and tigers in the zoo for his part, and you can really feel that.

On a single scene that sums up Mifune’s work for Okazaki

I saw this film called “Samurai Trilogy” when I was a teenager, and it made a huge impression on me. At that time, we would mostly play cowboys. Occasionally, we’d split into Jets and Sharks and reenact “West Side Story.” But when I saw “Samurai Trilogy,” I wanted a samurai sword.

And there’s a scene in that film that my friends and I would just — we talked about it endlessly — where Mifune’s sitting quietly, having some soba noodles, and these hoodlums crowd around, and they threaten him, and he doesn’t bat an eyelid. He just — with his chopsticks –starts plucking flies off his soba and out of the air. And the bad guys just go, “Whoa,” and they tear out of there. You know, he doesn’t pull out his sword. He doesn’t hurt anybody. He’s just so cool. He can just have lunch and scare people.

]]>http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/toshiro-mifune/feed/1Nora McInerny Recalls Living Life in the Face of Deathhttp://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/nora-mcinerny/
http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/nora-mcinerny/#respondFri, 02 Dec 2016 22:10:26 +0000http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/?p=9836In 2014, writer Nora McInerny had a year like few others: she miscarried a child, then lost her father and her husband to cancer. Those tragedies are the jumping off point for her new podcast “Terrible, Thanks for Asking,” a show about talking honestly — and with humor, too — about the painful things in life. Nora shares a story from her recent memoir, “It’s Okay to Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too),” in the audio above.
]]>http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/nora-mcinerny/feed/0Anthony Bourdain on How Fatherhood Influenced His New Cookbookhttp://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/anthony-bourdain/
http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/anthony-bourdain/#respondFri, 02 Dec 2016 22:10:02 +0000http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/?p=9814In 2000, Anthony Bourdain’s best-selling memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” gave readers what was then a shocking glimpse at the difficult, dangerous and sometimes hedonistic lives of restaurant kitchen workers.

The tough-talking master chef has since gone on to become a megastar of food and travel TV. He’s won a Peabody and three Emmys in a row for his current CNN travel show, “Parts Unknown.” Bourdain’s new cookbook — co-written with Laurie Woolever — is called “Appetites.”

He stopped by to answer a few of our listeners’ etiquette questions, but before he gave some wry advice, he talked to us about a few things, including how being a dad influenced “Appetites” and how the culinary world has changed since his “Kitchen Confidential” days.

Interview highlights:

On why he chose to write a cookbook at this point in his career

Anthony Bourdain: I’m a dad now of a 9-year-old girl and that’s who I’ve been cooking for for the last better part of nine years, and it makes me really happy.

Most of the work that I’ve been doing since I stopped cooking professionally, let’s be honest, it’s always been about me, me, me. And I thought this was– I’m not saying I’m giving back, but… it’s a rare departure in that I try to make something that’s useful and reflective of the kind of food that I’ve been making for the last few years as a dad.

On the one recipe that gets at the heart of what this cookbook is about

Anthony Bourdain: There are a couple of [recipes]. I mean, I think even the complicated sounding Budae Jjigae, which is a Korean army stew, is actually pretty child or dorm-friendly.

My daughter loves making ratatouille with me. She likes cooking pastas and eating pastas. Her mom’s Italian, so, you know, salty, a little fish and octopus tentacles, smelly cheese — these are not strangers to her.

Italian babies, by the way, if you go to the baby food aisle in Italy, they have like rabbit flavor and even a horse flavor. So, my joke was always like, when she reaches that age when she wants to, you know, “Daddy, I want a pony,” I could always grab her a jar of that and say, “Here’s your pony!”

On what strives to avoid when doing a cookbook

Anthony Bourdain: Food that’s too pretty or that you’re clearly not gonna be making at home — it will never look like that — or food that presumes that you’re gonna get hollandaise sauce right every time, for instance. You’re not.

Professionals learn through repetition and failure and more repetition. And I think understanding what you’re good at and what you should probably be trying… you shouldn’t be doing something over complicated if you’re having guests over you want to impress.

A lot of what I talk about in the book is just organizing yourself in a way that I’ve learned as a professional to cook at home for guests in a way that will allow you to actually spend time with them.

On how the culinary world has become a little more buttoned up since “Kitchen Confidential” was published

Anthony Bourdain: Well, look, I haven’t worked in a kitchen for 15 years. It’s a very different world. In fact, when I was writing about [it in] “Kitchen Confidential,” I was looking back at a period in the ’90s and ’80s and even the ’70s.

So, when “Kitchen Confidential” came out, I was not sitting at home snorting rails off a prostitute, you know? Life had changed a lot and the culture of kitchens has changed enormously since I left it.

[It’s] a lot more professional, it’s a higher status profession. If you’re smart and creative and work hard and have good standards, there’s a chance you might actually attain some kind of success or financial security. Whereas that was never a possibility in my time. Certainly, smoking or drinking heavily, or doing drugs visibly in the kitchen in front of other cooks, any kind of a quality restaurant, they tend to frown on that now.

If you’re getting into the restaurant business because you wanna party like it’s 1979, good luck to you. You’re not gonna last long.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

]]>http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/anthony-bourdain/feed/0Anthony Bourdain Gives Tough and Tender Advicehttp://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/anthony-bourdain-etiquette/
http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/anthony-bourdain-etiquette/#respondFri, 02 Dec 2016 22:09:36 +0000http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/?p=9820Each week our listeners send in your questions about how to behave, and answering them this time around is Anthony Bourdain. After talking with Brendan and Rico about his new cookbook and how the culinary world has changed since his “Kitchen Confidential” days, he stuck around to deliver some much-needed straight talk to our listeners.

Dealing with a loud friend in a quiet restaurant

Rico Gagliano: All right. Here’s something from Jason in Seattle. “What is the best way,” Jason writes, “to quiet down a friend who is a loud talker during a meal, especially in a nice restaurant.”

Anthony Bourdain: Wow. You look him right in the eyes and say, “Dude you are being like, loud, really loud. You’re a 10 now, and if you don’t bring it down to a five, I’m leaving.” And then never eat with him again. You just can’t have that. Cannot have that.

Brendan Francis Newnam: And do you say that at what level? A five a seven or a 10?

Anthony Bourdain: I think a very quiet voice except with more of like… you know how people’s eyes get in line ups, this sort of like, “I could kill you right now.”

Brendan Francis Newnam: Yeah, yeah menacing.

Anthony Bourdain: Yeah, like, “I need you to quiet right down now, because we are seconds away from this meal ending.”

Rico Gagliano: On one hand, though, I will say restaurants have become so loud themselves. It’s almost like you need to scream to be heard.

Anthony Bourdain: Look, we could take this over to T.G.I. Friday’s or a sports bar, and you could talk as loud as you want over the TV and the high fives.

An unappetizing appetizer

Brendan Francis Newnam: All right. This next question comes all the way from New Zealand. It’s from Sophie. And Sophie writes: “If someone serves me challenging offal without warning at a dinner party, is it OK for me to say I would rather poke my eyes out with a pen than have one mouthful of your tripe a la mode. I mean it’s a recipe from the Middle Ages, so OK, well done you, but I’m not bringing back the Black Death for a revamp at my next soiree.”

Anthony Bourdain: You will die friendless and alone. You have disrespected your host, OK? Rejected a beloved dish that’s reflective of probably personal history. That tripe a la mode could be a beloved family dish. You just basically spat in the milk of their mother. You rejected any possibility of trying something new. You revealed yourself to be an inward looking buffoon and no one I would want to be friends with.

Rico Gagliano: That’s the polite thing to say.

Brendan Francis Newnam: Wow.

Anthony Bourdain: Some pretty harsh answers here. And plus you sound kind of like a wiseacre, you know what I’m saying? You’re not coming to my party, let’s put it that way.

Brendan Francis Newnam: Someone served me inward looking buffoon and I had the same reaction as Sophie. I turned my nose up and now I’m regretting it.

Anthony Bourdain: Look, take a little bite. Just try a little bite. If you don’t like [it] say, “Not really to my [taste].” That is a respectable response. Just try a little bit.

Brendan Francis Newnam: Also, not to be regionally incorrect here, but she’s from New Zealand. Awful seems like it’s kind of par for the course.

Anthony Bourdain: Yeah exactly.

Rico Gagliano: I don’t know much about New Zealand cuisine.

Brendan Francis Newnam: They have to import everything.

Anthony Bourdain: A popular activity is chasing wild boar through the hills with a pack of dogs and stabbing them. It’s called– I mean literally that’s like a very popular activity there, which I approve of.

Disciplining someone else’s kids

Rico Gagliano: Here’s something from Nathaniel in Manlius, New York. One of the best town names in America. Nathaniel writes: “How do I discipline my in-laws’ kids when they visit for the holidays? Some of them are just awful and disrespectful to their parents. Do I just let it pass and explain to my kids later that their cousins are brats? ”

Anthony Bourdain: Yeah, I think you’re on target there. You can’t discipline other parents’ kids, as much as you might like to. If they’re monsters, you don’t let your kids play with them. You say, “Look, I don’t care what you think. They’re monsters. That kid’s going to grow up to be a serial killer. You’re not playing with him anymore.”

There’s no positive outcome to telling a parent that your kids are monstrous and they need to be disciplined. It’s not your role, and parents tend to not like hearing that.

Rico Gagliano: Yeah, that’s not a great dinner party conversation to have.

Anthony Bourdain: Right. Just stop inviting them until their kids are older.’

When is it OK to send a meal back?

Brendan Francis Newnam: This next question’s a short one, but it’s a good question. It comes from Tom in Chicago. Tom writes: “When is it appropriate to send a meal back to the kitchen? Is it enough just to say, I don’t like it?”

Anthony Bourdain: Look, if it is not cooked the way you asked, if there is something wrong with it — meaning it has diverged in some way from what was promised — then you are completely within your rights to politely call the server over, keeping in mind that your server did not cook your food, so do not please express your frustration on your server. That’s a sin. You know, that’s like the worst thing you could ever do is like get snippy and snarky with your waiter because of something the kitchen may or may not have done.

Now if it’s just not what you thought it was going to be and you don’t like it, preferably you wouldn’t send it back. You realize, “Look I’ve just made a mistake. I’m not going to order that again.” But I think if you really hate it, and you send it back, you should fully expect to pay for the thing. But more often than not a good restaurant they will, I think if they’re wise, accommodate you. I think it’s permissible and just be nice about it.

Rico Gagliano: Sure. And if you send it back, I’m assuming you maybe tip a little extra for the inconvenience to them.

Anthony Bourdain: That’s always a nice thing to do

Brendan Francis Newnam: Well, is the chef shielded from the fact that you sent a dish back just because you didn’t like it?

Anthony Bourdain: Uh no, the chef’s going to hear. And he may not like it. He or she might not like to hear that, but if they’re smart and they’re running a good business… Look, back in the day I would have screamed and yelled and smashed some plates and take it out on a waiter, and made everybody in the kitchen miserable and cursed all of the forces of the universe that conspired to bring me such a hateful, ignorant customer. This is why chefs die young and alcoholic.

The smart thing to do would be to suck it up and send the customer something that will make them happy. That’s good business and it’s probably good for everybody involved.

Dealing with a hard-drinking holiday party patron

Rico Gagliano: Here’s our last question and kind of appropriate as we’re sort of in the holiday season. This is from Ashley via Facebook and she writes, “My husband and I threw a cocktail party every December with many friends. This year, I’ve been asked to not invite a certain person who tends to drink too much and starts drama. I personally don’t have a problem with this person, but a growing number of people disagree. Do I just not invite her and let her learn through word of mouth that the party is happening without her, tell her straight up, or make my friend break the news to her?”

Anthony Bourdain: Look it’s awkward, but, there’s nothing funny about alcoholism. I mean you get a loud obnoxious drunk ruining your party. It is understandable when you don’t invite him again. You have to think about the good of the community.

How do you approach? “I didn’t invite you because, let’s face it, you’re a bad drinker. You get loud, you get belligerent, you know, and you miss the bowl.”

Brendan Francis Newnam: You make it sound so easy! And I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been watching you for years, but, yeah, why don’t more people just call and tell it like it is?

Anthony Bourdain: Look it’s a friend who causes big scenes of drama at you know, at Christmas.

Brendan Francis Newnam: Yeah, not OK.

Rico Gagliano: Anthony Bourdain, it’s been a joy having you. Thank you so much for telling our audience how to behave.

Anthony Bourdain: My pleasure, anytime.

]]>http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/anthony-bourdain-etiquette/feed/0Mackenzie Davis Worries About the Next ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/mackenzie-davis-worries-about-the-next-manic-pixie-dream-girl/
http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/mackenzie-davis-worries-about-the-next-manic-pixie-dream-girl/#respondFri, 02 Dec 2016 22:09:11 +0000http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/?p=9821Actor Mackenzie Davis plays the punk rock coding genius Cameron in the AMC series “Halt and Catch Fire.” She has also appeared in the latest season of the celebrated U.K. anthology show “Black Mirror.” And you may have seen her on the big screen in “The Martian.”

Her latest film is called “Always Shine.” It’s both a psychological thriller and a look at the sexist pressures of Hollywood. It’s about two actors, Beth and Anna, who go to Big Sur for the weekend to mend their strained friendship. Sweet and passive Beth has a career on the rise. Mackenzie plays the more outspoken and assertive Anna, who can’t seem to catch a break.

Brendan Francis Newnam: Which character in “Always Shine” do you identify with more?

Mackenzie Davis: Anna and I share some characteristics — sort of an assertiveness and maybe… I feel like I was always received a lot more aggressively than I was intending to be, and Anna, I think, intends to be quite aggressive.

But a scene that, really, I relate to is the scene in the bar where Anna is flirting with this new person that they’ve met in Big Sur. And her friend, Beth, is being silent and, in her point of view, completely uninteresting the whole time, and just sitting there disinterested. And Anna is really engaged with this new man that she’s met, and thinks that she’s flirting, and is arguing and challenging him, and asking him to defend these things he’s saying.

And she, and I, feel like that’s what flirting, what connecting is. Is having this really engaged, confrontational experience. And then you see later that he’s totally turned off by that and is much more interested in this meek, un-speaking, beautiful cipher in the corner. And that sort of realization that engaging head on with the world isn’t actually something that a lot of people like is an experience that I’ve definitely had in the past. And that particular feeling of being like, “Oh, I don’t think I know what flirting is.”

Brendan Francis Newnam: When that guy turned on Anna a little bit and started to be put off by her, at that point, I didn’t really get a sense why. It didn’t seem like what she was engaging in seemed crazy to me.

Mackenzie Davis: Well, I think using him as a — and relating to the other male character in the movie, Jesse — is they kind of want a vessel to project themselves onto. And, when Anna becomes that vessel, she’s very successful romantically, you know, in the broadest of terms. And when she isn’t that vessel, she gets rejected. And I think it’s just this sort of broad criticism of a type of man that, or, you know, a type of society that would require women to reflect rather than express.

Mackenzie Davis in “Always Shine.” (Image courtesy of Visit Films.)

Brendan Francis Newnam: And that’s also, of course, heightened. These are both actors, and in that industry, you know, an actor is a vessel directly of, often, a writer’s words and that sort of thing. Do you think, in your experience, Hollywood is the same, better, or worse than society in general when it comes to these sort of gender expectations?

Mackenzie Davis: I think it’s the same. Maybe it’s a more distinct drawing of some of those lines. I mean, I think a really clever thing that Lawrence Levine, Sophia Takal’s husband, who wrote the movie — Sophia Takal directed it — did was to use the device of actresses to tell very clear gender stories.

Because actresses are required to have this sort of succinct and emblematic femininity to project. There’s not a lot of uncertainty with actresses. You’re sort of — with a few notable exceptions that dare to be — you’re sort of expected to present the sort of Cinderella complex or something. And that makes it an easy surrogate to tell stories about gender, because we’re expected to be so singularly female and singularly male.

Brendan Francis Newnam: And yet, your character, Cameron Howe, from “Halt and Catch Fire” kind of breaks that paradigm. She’s this brilliant punk rock coder, a strong leading woman. When you read for the part, were you aware that this was an exceptional thing, and were you excited about that?

Mackenzie Davis: Yeah, incredibly excited at both because of the place that my career was at where that wasn’t a world that felt really open to me at that time. And she just felt so different.

I think there’s an interesting thing right now where it’s become trendy, maybe, to talk about strong female characters. But there’s nothing inherently more human about strong female characters than weak female characters. I think the struggle is just to make human women that are strong and weak and strange and embarrassed and have all of the dimensions of a normal human woman instead of just archetyping another sort of brand of character.

And I think what’s interesting about Cameron and Donna on the show is they’re just all sorts of people in one body. And they’re ambitious, and they’re cutthroat, and they’re deeply empathetic with each other, and jealous, and loving. And they’re just all sorts of things. And that’s what really attracts me to Cameron and to her relationship with Donna, is just letting them be humans before being a type.

Brendan Francis Newnam: Yeah. The strong female characters also can be a trope just as much as any other sort of character can become.

Mackenzie Davis: Yeah. I feel a little sensitive to it right now, where I’m like, “Oh, don’t let this be the new, like, ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl,’ where it’s just another sort of type that asks us not to investigate the deeper levels of a woman.”

Brendan Francis Newnam: Amen. Well, we have come to the point in our interview where, to investigate the deeper levels of our guests, we ask them to tell us something we don’t know, and this can be a personal fact or an interesting piece of trivia about the world.

Mackenzie Davis: OK. I am going to try to make this sound as off-the-cuff as possible, just because I wrote it down. But it’s something I’m very interested in.

Brendan Francis Newnam: All right, but I’m going to leave you saying that in, just so you know.

Mackenzie Davis: Oh, sure. Yeah, I’m just going to just rip on this idea for a second. OK, so I wanted to talk about kamikaze termites. Have you heard about them?

Brendan Francis Newnam: I have not heard about kamikaze termites.

Mackenzie Davis: OK. Well, there is a species of termite in the rainforests of French Guyana in which the oldest workers in the colony grow these sacs on their abdomen containing a toxic blue liquid that they explode onto their enemies to guard their colonies. And, basically, what happens is: as the termites age and they become less useful to the colony, their mandibles dull, they can’t tend to the nest.

Brendan Francis Newnam: They could wear little mandible dentures.

Mackenzie Davis: No, no, no, they have a new purpose! So, the soldiers in the colony are the eldest, the most expendable members of the society, instead of being the youngest that mean the most to propagate the species. So, the older they get, the more toxic this liquid grows inside of them.

Brendan Francis Newnam: That is so gnarly. And is there a kamikaze procedure? They die when they blow up. I guess that’s where they get their name.

Mackenzie Davis: Yeah, they blow themselves up to guard the colony.

Brendan Francis Newnam: Are you into this sort of stuff, like insects, or were you just lost in the Internet?

Mackenzie Davis: Yeah. Last summer, I got really into — I don’t know — sort of the savagery of the insect world… I like the idea of the destruction of the self to protect the whole. I think it’s a cool aspect that happens on a biological level that’s maybe been socialized.

]]>http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/mackenzie-davis-worries-about-the-next-manic-pixie-dream-girl/feed/0Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner Spins Some Sweet Ol’ Tuneshttp://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/lambchop-kurt-wagner/
http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/lambchop-kurt-wagner/#respondFri, 02 Dec 2016 22:08:18 +0000http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/?p=9817Musician Kurt Wagner is the frontman for the Nashville music collective Lambchop and over the course of 12 albums, he’s drawn on everything from country to hip-hop, to create odd, lyrically rich music. With his new album, “Flotus,” he’s added beat-driven electronica into the mix. The Los Angeles Times describes it as, “something really magical.”

Here’s Kurt with a party soundtrack filled with vintage tunes for the next time you’re slurping soup and passing the dinner rolls.

Kurt Wagner: It never hurts to kick off things with a little Lefty Frizzell. It’s a song called “Bring Your Sweet Self Back to Me.”

There’s something about the man’s voice that draws you in. And he starts out in a sort of a capella unadorned sort of way. You think it’s going to maybe become a mournful, beautiful, sad ballad, and it just kicks over into something straight out of “Hee Haw.”

I grew up in Nashville in the ’60s. My folks were from Brooklyn, and they’d just moved down to Nashville. And it was like they’d moved to the moon. I was a young man with hair down to my butt. But I was fascinated by country music.

They had like a superstore for steel guitars, and you could see all these musicians just hanging around because had nothing better to do and they were all just wailing away. So it was kind of like hanging out in outer space. All these crazy sounds. And I was completely taken with it.

Dick Todd — “Daddy, You’ve Been a Mother to Me”

So, I think the next song going to play, we’re going to get right to it. This is a guy named Dick Todd. While you’re slurping up your soup and maybe passing the dinner rolls, we can listen to the song. It’s called “Daddy, You’ve Been a Mother to Me.”

One of the things that draws me to this type of music, there’s a sound that sort of takes you to this place when dinner parties, I think, were an important way people got together and shared their lives together. That kind of orchestration sort of sets that mood for me. Maybe I’m just an old dude.

He’s so damn sincere, you know? But somehow I think maybe it can be read in a different context, a more modern version of what we think of when something’s a mother.

Ink Spots — “Do I Worry”

The next song that we’re going to check out is a song by the Ink Spots and it’s called, “Do I Worry”

For me, they actually could be one of the true innovators of hip-hop. I mean this is a doo-wop group that introduced spoken word into their songs. I think hip-hop came out of doo-wop. It came from people just making music a capella on the streets.

I started out as a sculptor, and I was getting my Masters in Montana. Winters would last at least 10 months. So there’s a lot of shut in time. And I created a room and I drew on every surface of the room: the bed, the windows, the walls.

I was sort of thinking, “Well if you were kind of trapped by a snowstorm, and all you had was like a ballpoint pen or a pencil, what would happen?” [Laughs.] “Start drawing on all your stuff!” And then, when I finally unveiled it as part of a show, I had on the loop an Ink Spots song.

Lambchop — “Howe”

I would absolutely never play our Lambchop song at one of our own dinner parties, but I’m making this exception for y’all [laughs].

The way that I’ve sort of been going about writing the songs for this new record — and our track “Howe” in particular– is I essentially just use my voice and a software program. So I didn’t use a guitar or anything like that. Just simply using that technology and then sort of expanding upon it.

Usually at the end of a party when things are winding down, I’m doing the dishes and just kind of making sure that everything’s shipshape before I just go full boar into the chair and nod ride out like an old timer.

]]>http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/lambchop-kurt-wagner/feed/0#DinnerPartyAftermath 2016 Photoshttp://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/dinnerpartyaftermath-2016-photos/
http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/dinnerpartyaftermath-2016-photos/#respondMon, 28 Nov 2016 21:36:04 +0000http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/?p=9800We asked our listeners for photos of their post-Thanksgiving meal photos with us and they delivered! Take in the subtle beauty of a post-meal landscape filled with half-eaten pies, almost empty wine glasses, dirty dishes, and bunched up napkins in the photos below.

The Booze

The Ruthless Spud

created by David Frederick, bartender at 9 Maple Avenue in George Crum’s hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York.Ingredients:
In a cocktail shaker, combine:

3 slices of cucumber

Very thin slice of rustic potato

Dash of olive juice

Muddle together ‘til it’s as murky as the potato chip’s origin. Then add:

3 oz. Chopin potato vodka

Instructions:

Shake well. Strain into martini glass. Sip again and again until you realize you’ve gone through the whole thing all by yourself.

]]>http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/ruthless-spud/feed/0The DPD Guide to Thanksgivinghttp://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/guide-to-thanksgiving/
http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/guide-to-thanksgiving/#respondThu, 24 Nov 2016 00:33:37 +0000http://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/?p=7728Thanksgiving is upon us and since it is technically the biggest dinner party of the year, we thought it would be a good time to revisit a few pieces to help you win your Thanksgiving! You’ll find tips from Bon Appétit, an icebreaker, and a few more turkey day bits. It’s our way of giving thanks to you for listening to us each week.